Page:The Hittites - the Story of a Forgotten Empire.djvu/15

Rh hundred and fifty: and so for all the kings of the Hittites, and for the kings of Syria, did they bring them out by their means.' The Hebrew merchants, in fact, were the mediatories between Egypt and the north, and exported the horses of Egypt not only for the king of Israel but for the kings of the Hittites as well.

The Hittites whose cities and princes are thus referred to in the later historical books of the Old Testament belonged to the north, Hamath and Kadesh on the Orontes being their most southernly points. But the Book of Genesis introduces us to other Hittites—'the children of Heth,' as they are termed—whose seats were in the extreme south of Palestine. It was from 'Ephron the Hittite' that Abraham bought the cave of Machpelah at Hebron (Gen. xxiii.), and Esau 'took to wife Judith the daughter of Beeri the Hittite, and Bashemath the daughter of Elon the Hittite' (Gen. xxvi. 34), or, as it is given elsewhere, 'Adah the daughter of Elon the Hittite' (Gen. xxxvi. 2). It must be to these Hittites of the south that the ethnographical table in the tenth chapter of Genesis refers when it is said that 'Canaan begat Sidon his first-born, and Heth' (ver. 15), and in no other way can we explain the statement of Ezekiel (xvi. 3, 45) that 'the father' of Jerusalem 'was an Amorite and' its 'mother a Hittite.' 'Uriah the Hittite,' too, the trusty officer of David, must have come from the neighbourhood of Hebron, where David had reigned for seven years, rather than from among the distant Hittites of the north. Besides the latter there was thus a Hittite population which clustered round Hebron, and to whom the origin of Jerusalem was partly due.